Food & Drink All you can eat

On Sunday, November 6, La Villita Historic Arts Village will host the New Orleans Market Day & Festival, featuring art, crafts, music, and food created by displaced Gulf Coast artisans.

The brain-child of Planet of the Tapes owner and all-around community girl Angela Martinez, Market Day partners displaced artisans with local sponsors, so that they can create goods to sell at the event. “`Market Day` isn’t a fundraising event,” Martinez told the Current in an e-mail. “It makes it possible for displaced chefs, musicians, artists, and craftspeople to work’ for a day to make their own money, to stop wearing the evacuee label for a day, and be whatever they were before the wind blew them here. We are all getting together to celebrate New Orleans.”

Martinez is recruiting musicians, cooks, seamstresses, woodcarvers, and makers of dolls, soap, jewelry, candles, windchimes, and birdhouses, as well as San Antonio sponsors willing to provide materials and/or workspace for the artists. For more information, call 212-9373 or visit neworleansmarket.org.

A spirited brunch

La Mansión del Rio Hotel, 112 College, will honor the founding brothers of the Society of Mary, who established St. Mary’s Institute in 1852, and their students with a Día de Los Muertos brunch at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, October 30. The restaurant’s altar will display memorabilia and photographs from St. Mary’s Institute, and ofrendas, including corn.

Save the eggs for Easter; the Día de Los Muertos brunch includes festive breads decorated with skulls and skeletons, pink-peppercorn-studded chicken with manzanilla broth, and cilantro-scented butternut-squash soup with shredded manchego cheese and toasted pepitas. Reservations are necessary, call 518-1063.